The electronics assembly industry uses machines such as pick and place machines to automatically pick components from component feeders and place the components upon circuit boards during board assembly. Subsequently, the components themselves are permanently attached to the circuit board at locations where the pick and place machine has deposited them. Due the relatively high speed required for such operations as well as the extremely small-scale of the components themselves, component placement and alignment are extremely important. In order to facilitate advances in component placement and alignment, optical systems and associated processors have advanced accordingly. One common element of a pick and place system is known as the board align image acquisition device. Typically, this image acquisition device resides upon a placement head and is used to essentially image a reference position (also known as a fiducial) on the board. By determining the placement of the head via encoders, or other suitable position measuring means, associated therewith, and determining the position of the fiducial from the image supplied by the board align camera, the relative position of the placement head with respect to the board is precisely known.
The position of the component to be placed on the placement head is calculated in a similar manner but with a generally upward-looking component align (CA) image acquisition device. The component align image acquisition device generally acquires an image of the component to be placed after it has been picked up by the placement head. The host processor then determines the position of the component on the placement head and knowing the position of the placement head with respect to the board, so manipulates the component to be placed that it is oriented correctly and placed properly upon the board. Thus, a typical pick and place system includes a pair of image acquisition device (board align and component align). Due to the relatively high-speed operation of pick and place machines, there is a relatively large amount of data (both image data and control data) that passes between the host processor and the various image acquisition devices and their associated illuminators. A pick and place system that could accommodate the relatively high data transfer burdens while simultaneously simplifying wiring and reducing costs would be a significant increase in the art. Moreover, if such system could provide data transfer rate head room beyond that which is currently needed and accommodate future scalability, system implementation would be facilitated.